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Black Lake (song)
"Black Lake" is a song by Björk from her ninth studio album, ''Vulnicura''. Background In the album booklet, the sub-title for this song is “2 months after”, signifying that this song was written 2 months after the breakup of the relationship between Björk and Matthew Barney. The song was written while Björk was in Japan. Described as “a 10-minute song in which she works up the nerve to throw darts at Barney and release the fluid fury of a woman scorned. From a inteview with Reykjavik Grapevine in January 2015:Reykjavik Grapevine: "Björk's Folk Music" (2015) "I think I was mostly focused on emotion. This is the record’s hardest song for me. It was written three months after the divorce. I flew to Japan and didn’t manage to adjust to the time difference, because… you know… silence. It was really the bottom for me, in that process. I had checked into this wonderful health retreat to recover from the jetlag, it was just me and James Björk’s assistant and his boyfriend Jón, acting silly and having laughing fits. And there were these hot springs and everyone was wearing Samurai clothes, as if we were in a Japanese animé. I would operate on Icelandic time, sleeping through the day, spending my nights soaking in the hotsprings by myself. And I wrote this song, insanely jetlagged, and I had to work through this feeling… It’s like, when you’re trying to express something and you sort of start, but then nothing comes out. You can maybe utter five words and then you’re just stuck in the pain. And the chords in-between, they sort of represent that. Those minutes of stuttering silence. Then, you maybe manage a few more words, and then you’re stuck again. We called them “the freezes,” these moments between the verses. They’re longer than the verses, actually. It’s just that one emotion when you’re stuck. It is hard, but it’s also the only way to escape the pain, just going back and having another go, trying to make another verse. Black Lake also employs a method that I used a long time ago, in a song off Post that’s called Possibly Maybe. In that song, each verse was named after a month, it was nine verses for nine months. Actually, some of those verses wound up being cut, and of course it’s not at all as dramatic, but it shares with Black Lake a… a temporality? As in, the song progresses through time. The first verse happens a month after… I can’t remember for sure, but the second verse is maybe a week later, and the next verse is a week after that. By the time we reach the last verse, something has changed, something is different." Another comment on the song from the same interview: I felt almost embarrassed about some of what’s on that album. Like with Black Lake. It’s so full of self-pity. However, it feels a little different if I can say : “that song was written three months after the divorce—give me a break ! I was maybe feeling really sorry for myself and filled with cowardice when I wrote that, but a few months have passed—I’m doing better now !” So there’s also humour in it. But I could barely stand to play it for my friends. I felt embarrassed." A live version was released on Vulnicura Live. Music video The music video was directed by Andrew Huang and was initially only available at Björk’s MoMA exhibit. A trailer of the music video was uploaded on MoMAvideos on February 13th, 2015, and the full music video was uploaded to Björk’s YouTube channel on June 9th. Lyrics References Category:Songs Category:Vulnicura songs Category:Music videos